Culture

Culture

The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.

Night moves

Television

The Night Manager (BBC1, Sunday) announced its intentions immediately, when the opening credits lovingly combined weapons and luxury items. ‘Blimey,’ we were clearly intended to think, ‘it’s a bit like James Bond.’ True, the main character works — at this stage, anyway — in the hotel trade rather than as a secret agent. Yet, when

Marty’s way

Television

Vinyl (Sky Atlantic) — the much-anticipated series, co-produced by Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger, about the 1970s New York record industry — began on Monday with a two-hour episode directed by Scorsese himself. The result was, as you’d expect, an exhilarating watch. So why did it also create an undeniable feeling of slight disappointment? One

In excess

Television

Judging from its website, Hebden Bridge’s tourist office considers the fact that BBC1’s Happy Valley is filmed in the town something of a selling point. Personally, I can’t see why. (Perhaps points of especial tourist interest might include the cellar where Sergeant Catherine Cawood was almost battered to death, or the caravan site where drug

Weekend world

Television

When the time comes to make programmes looking back on the 2010s, I wonder which aspects of life today will seem the weirdest. Quinoa? The fact that we were expected to be ‘passionate’ about our jobs? Being so overexcited by new technology that we constantly stared at phones? Or maybe it’ll just be how many

An inconvenient truth | 28 January 2016

Television

On the face of it, the Netflix documentary serial Making a Murderer should only take up ten hours of your life. Judging from my experience, though, its ten episodes will prove so overwhelmingly riveting that you’re going to need at least two more days to scour the internet in an obsessive quest for every scrap

James Delingpole

Class of ’83

Television

No one remembers this now but there really was a period, not so long ago, when the Eighties were universally reviled as the ‘decade that style forgot’. For a time it got so bad that none of us survivors could even bear to look at old photos of ourselves: mullets, feather cuts, Limahl-style bleaching, pastels,

Compliance order

Television

Never a man tortured by self-doubt, Derren Brown introduced his latest special Pushed to the Edge (Channel 4, Tuesday) as a fascinating psychological experiment about the dangers of ‘social compliance’ — our willingness to do what authority figures ask, however morally dubious. In fact, much of what followed was a weird, and itself rather morally

James Delingpole

Coming up for air | 7 January 2016

Television

Gosh what a breath of fresh air was Andrew Davies’s War & Peace adaptation (BBC1, Sundays) after all the stale rubbish that was on over Christmas. There were times when the yuletide TV tedium got so bad that I considered preparing us all a Jonestown-style punchbowl. That way, we would never have had to endure

Losing the plot | 31 December 2015

Television

On the face of it, ITV’s Peter & Wendy sounded like a perfect family offering for Boxing Day: an adaptation of J.M. Barrie’s novel, with a framing story about how much Peter Pan can still mean to children today. In fact, though, the programme suffered from one serious flaw for any Boxing Day entertainment —

Beyond a joke | 3 December 2015

Television

Let’s start this week with a joke: ‘You know Mrs Kelly? Do you know Mrs Kelly? Her husband’s that little stout man, always on the corner of the street in a greasy waistcoat. You must know Mrs Kelly. Well, of course if you don’t, you don’t, but I thought you did, because I thought everybody

The man who wouldn’t be king

Television

Not that long ago the BBC trumpeted a new Stakhanovite project to big up the arts in its many and various hues. And praise be, this it is jolly well doing with all sorts of dad rock docs, homages to painters and poets, while Sralan Yentob (as he surely ought at the very least to

James Delingpole

Spying and potting

Television

The main problem with being a TV critic, I’ve noticed over the years, is that you have to watch so much TV. It’s not that I’m against it in principle: I like my evening’s televisual soma as much as the next shattered wage slave with no life. But the reality is that you end up

Why most four-year-olds deserve to be sectioned

Television

The first episode of Let Us Entertain You (BBC2, Wednesday) definitely couldn’t be accused of lacking a central thesis. Presenter Dominic Sandbrook began by arguing that, since its industrial heyday, Britain has changed from a country that manufactures and exports things into one that, just as successfully, manufactures and exports popular culture. He then continued

James Delingpole

DVF worship

Television

Girl is back for half-term so I’ve been able to watch nothing but crap on TV this week. Some of you will say, ‘Oh come on! You pay the bills, so you get to control the remote.’ But that’s not how things work when you’ve got a teenage girl at home. Especially not one whose

The Last Kingdom is BBC2’s solemnly cheesy answer to Game of Thrones

Television

The opening caption for The Last Kingdom (BBC2, Thursday) read ‘Kingdom of Northumbria, North of England, 866 AD’. In fact, though, an equally accurate piece of scene-setting might have been ‘Britain, Saturday teatime, the 1970s’. The series, based on the novels by Bernard Cornwell, has been described in advance as the BBC’s answer to Game

James Delingpole

Independents’ day

Television

I really hadn’t meant to write a postscript to last week’s column on my dark Supertramp past. But then along came a TV programme which reminded me: I WAS cool once. It happened after Oxford when I became, almost simultaneously, both an acid-house freak and an indie kid. And BBC4’s three-part special — Music For

Talk of the devil | 24 September 2015

Television

For years, Ian Fleming was famously self-deprecating about the James Bond books. (‘I have a rule of not looking back,’ he once said. ‘Otherwise I’d wonder, “How could I write such piffle?”’) Towards the end of his life, though, he finally produced an essay in their defence — proudly pointing out, among other things, that

James Delingpole

Socialist Cluedo

Television

What a load of manipulative, hysterical tosh is An Inspector Calls. It wasn’t a work with which I was familiar till I saw the latest TV adaptation. Now, of course, I see exactly why the luvvies — see, for example, Stephen Daldry’s highly acclaimed early 1990s National Theatre revival — adore it so. It confirms

Cock and bull

Television

It’s hard to know whether the actor James Norton was being naive or disingenuous when he claimed in publicity interviews for BBC1’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover that ‘We are no longer shocked that people have sex.’ Either way, the tabloids soon proved him wrong. Days before the programme went out, the Sun had duly worked itself

James Delingpole

Lifting the veil

Television

Finally I realise why women are so pissed off. It all goes back to the first codified laws — circa 2,400 bc — when rules like this were invented by men: ‘If a woman speaks out of turn then her teeth will be smashed by a brick.’ Before that, apparently, women lived on a pretty

Will he was

Television

In 2011, the Daily Mail carried a long story about how the Queen’s cousin Prince William of Gloucester, who died in a plane crash aged 30, had been Prince Charles’s boyhood idol. (Our own Prince William, it claimed, was named after him.) In passing, it tactfully informed us that William’s ex-girlfriend Zsuzsi Starkloff ‘no longer

James Delingpole

Poldark porn

Television

My favourite moment in The Scandalous Lady W (BBC2, Monday) was when the heroine played by Natalie Dormer was shown being taken vigorously from behind by one of her 27 lovers. It wasn’t the sex that did it for me but the appalled expression on the face of Girl, who, with perfect timing, had just

Sick and tired

Television

When the link between tobacco and lung cancer was first established in the early 1950s, one obvious question arose: should doctors tell people not to smoke? These days, of course, the answer seems equally obvious — but at the time, medical opinion was divided. According to the highly distinguished Dr Erich Geiringer in a letter

James Delingpole

Nuclear overreaction

Television

When I was growing up in the 1970s, my three main fears were: being blown up by the IRA; being eaten by a Jaws-like great white shark; being vaporised by a nuclear bomb. I expect it was the same for most kids of my generation. The first two, obviously, were a function of the Birmingham

Affairs in squares

Television

On all those comic lists of the world’s shortest books (Great Italian War Heroes, My Hunt for the Real Killers, by O.J. Simpson etc.), the best title I ever came across was Bloomsbury: the Untold Story. Now, though, BBC2’s new drama, Life in Squares, is giving us yet another chance to marvel at how many